What’s in a word? An Interdisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Skill’ in Technical and Vocational Education and Training in England

Notions of skill pervade the UK further education sector’s policy and practices but, despite its ubiquity, skill has been used in different ways to mean different things to different stakeholders within the sector, specifically in relation to technical and vocational education and training. Influenced by theories of human capital, policy documents and representatives have long recycled clusters of generic and transferable skill. Concurrently, qualification design incorporates a wide range of skills from technical to broader notions which creates ambiguous and incoherent notions of skill for teachers working within the sector.

Building on interdisciplinary perspectives of skill, including philosophical and sociological conceptualisations, and using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), drawing on insights from Critical Realism (Fairclough, 2010), this thesis explored the relationship and implications of the skills discourse and its recontextualisation from policy to practice, building on a literature that problematises the skills discourse to highlight the marginalisation of fractions of the working class in education and employment. Two CDAs were carried out to examine the relationship between the educational and societal role of 'skills' discourses in UK governments' skills policies and how trainee teachers and teacher educators working in the technical and vocational education sector draw on skills discourses in their practice. At the macro level, CDA 1 analysed contemporary UK skills policy texts between 2016-2021 and, at the micro level, CDA 2 analysed the discourse of 18 subjects, across four focus groups of trainee teachers and teacher educators.

The CDAs revealed a relationship between the skills discourses employed in UK education policy - which emphasises a neoliberal, human capital perspective of skill wedded to capitalist interests, focussed increasingly on higher-level technical skills - and the discursive practice of teacher educators and trainee teachers. In this context, CDA 2 presented the trainee teachers as having a deep understanding of the technical and broader skills required in their occupations and, coupled with their strong occupational identities, their discourse accommodates the policy and its employer-led occupational standards, enabling them to operate as gatekeepers to their occupations, whilst enhancing their own standing. Simultaneously, CDA 2 found that the discourse of teacher educators is bound up with generic higher education notions of ‘graduate skills’ and ‘graduate employability’. This complements a narrow and weak discursive frame which underpins the initial teacher education curriculum, linked to atomised professional standards, whereby generic teaching practices are centred to the exclusion of strongly classified theoretical and subject specialist knowledge. This generic and weak discursive framing highlights a disconnect, which contributes to a narrower skills discourse and consequently, marginalisation of disciplines in this sector. These discourses, shared by technical teachers unwittingly transmitting policy discourse, and TEds whose generic discourse does not challenge this, act in concert both to marginalise TVET and limit the extent of its ITE.

This work has implications for policy makers and those involved in curriculum development in education and training, with the current political skills discourse proving unsustainable and incoherent in the context of teacher education for this sector.